With the vigorous growth of World Wide Web, more and more services are provided to users via web applications. The mashing up among different web applications in a simple and efficient way in order to form new web applications is becoming an increasingly pressing need.
Currently, the major approach of mashing up web applications is performed by means of application programming interfaces (API). Specifically, the owner of a web application needs to expose the relevant API in order to let the web application be mashed up by other users.
For example, with the API of Google map, a user can integrate customized data, e.g. weather forecast, on top of Google map.
However, owners of many web applications do not explicitly define and expose relevant APIs for reasons, such as costs, difficulty in transforming an existing application system and the like.
Therefore, the aforesaid solution of mashing up web applications using the APIs of web applications has limitation. That is, if the owner of a web application does not expose the relevant API, then users cannot use the web application for mashing up.
To sum up, there is a need to propose a solution of mashing up web applications without depending on the APIs of web applications, so as to increase the flexibility and the applicability of mashing up web applications.